Fwd: migrating our wiki platform to mediawiki

I'm happy with this suggestion. Everyone else OK?

Steven

------- Forwarded message -------
From: "olivier Thereaux" <ot@w3.org>
To: chairs@w3.org
Cc:
Subject: migrating our wiki platform to mediawiki
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 03:26:27 +0200


Dear W3C chairs,

Through your staff contacts, and from some of you directly, the W3C
systems team received a steady flow of requests to consider switching
the engine running w3c wikis from moinmoin to the mediawiki engine,
notably for its section editing capability, and for its semantic
annotation plugin (semantic mediawiki).

Mediawiki is the engine used to run the wikipedia site, and may be
already familiar to many of you.


After careful evaluation, we concluded that the migration would be
possible but tricky. In particular:
* we should be able to keep the same URI space
* existing content in our wiki will be copied to the new engine
* it may not be possible to migrate revision history for all the
documents.
We would look into saving the revision history somewhere in web
space, for the record.
* user accounts look difficult to migrate. In the worst case, all
users would have to re-create accounts. In the "best" case all users
may have to reinitialize their password
* plug-ins may be migrated, if possible, on a case-by-case basis.
"Themes" are unlikely to be migrated.


Consequently, we would like to hear from you, if you are chairing a
group currently using a wiki on the moinmoin platform, whether you
would object to the migration to the mediawiki engine, given the
potential issues listed above.

If possible, please answer within the next week if you have any
strong objection.

We can not, yet, give any timeline for the migration, but will have a
better idea of a time scale after receiving your answers.

Thank you.
For the W3C Systems Team,

Received on Wednesday, 11 July 2007 11:37:17 UTC